Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
~John F. Kennedy Jr.
President John F. Kennedy said this in an address in the White House on March 13, 1962, at a reception for the diplomatic corps of the Latin American Republics.
Of the many memorable quotes by Kennedy, this is one of my favorites because it reminds us of two things. First, how important it is that a governmental system facilitate peaceful progress and reform and second, the danger of not doing so.
This, almost universal truism, is even more relevant in the American system because we were born in revolution and, as a result, have a long history of justifying acts of violence, although clearly illegal, as legitimate.
For this reason, it is even more important in our system that we work to insure there are robust pathways for peaceful progress and change.
To see how well we are doing on this score, consider the following.
In the Spring of 1982, former Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon delivered a commencement address at Tufts University. The focus of his talk was our constitutional system and its inability to address the problems facing the nation. More than forty years later, it is stunning that so many of the issues he spoke about, issues on which the government failed to act in 1982, remain problems today: the budget, deficit, energy, social security, foreign relations, and gun control.
In the context of gun control, Dillon spoke about how unconscionable it is that the federal government failed to enact legislation despite “polls showing that it is desired by at least three quarters of the electorate.”
That was 1982.
Since that time the nation has experienced nine of the eleven deadliest mass shootings in modern history including the 2017 killing of sixty people at the Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, the 2016 massacre at an Orlando night club which left forty-nine dead, the shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 which left thirty-two members of the campus community dead, the 2012 rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School which left twenty-six dead, including twenty, six and seven year old children, and another horrific school shooting, this time in Uvalde Texas when nineteen third and fourth graders and two of their teachers were killed, along with another seveteen who were wounded.
It was not until after the slaughter at Robb Elementary in Uvalde – four decades since Dillon’s address - that the federal government finally passed gun control legislation, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Consider another issue, illegal immigration.
For decades, people from the left and right, Republicans and Democrats, have agreed that our immigration system is in crisis and badly needed repair. In 2000, President George W. Bush was elected in part on his promise that as a border Governor he had the knowledge and background to fix the nation’s broken immigration system. Despite eight years in office, however, the situation only continued to worsen.
Bush was followed by Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Donald Trump again (albeit six months in) – all of whom committed to fixing our broken immigration problem and none of whom were able to work effectively with Congress to pass common sense immigration reform. They have, in some cases, acted via Executive Order and action, but fixing the system requires federal legislation, which has yet to occur. This is still the case today, even though for years, millions of Americans have said this is a critical issue that needs to be addressed.
We can substitute in countless other issues, and each time we will find that outside of crises, the US government is at best very slow to respond to the needs of its people or, at worse, completely unable. It is in many instances, if not most, unresponsive to the majority will. Something which, as President Kennedy tells us, is dangerous because when you make peaceful change, reform, and progress difficult, you incentivize violence and revolution.
The question we should ask ourselves is why is change so difficult in our system? Is it just that we keep electing ineffective people to office? Or is there something else more insidious at play?
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Notes:
John F. Kennedy, Jr. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-first-anniversary-the-alliance-for-progress
Donald L. Robinson https://www.abebooks.com/9780813371146/Reforming-American-Government-Bicentennial-Papers-0813371147/plp
Deadliest Mass Shootings, Axios https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/deadliest-mass-shootings-modern-us-history
Bipartisan Safer Communities Act https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/2938/text
